The brine dwelling fellows below didn’t seem super interested in responding to me in a useful way. Maybe I hadn’t yelled at them in the right language? I was pretty sure that I hit Rositsa’s language. So maybe they weren’t from the same world.

What to do? I couldn’t just leave them and go to the portal. I mean, I could but Extra might have some complaints about me just letting extradimensional people wander around. Especially if they had the capacity to be dangerous. Rositsa was great, but she was dangerous. And these guys clearly did a bunch of blood magic. I couldn’t tell who the blood would be from, but it would be difficult to say this all came from volunteers.

I flew a little bit closer. “Hey, can you understand me?” They had the same sort of features as Rositsa, including stark white hair. Though I couldn’t see the color of their eyes in darkness. “You need to-”

One of them reached out and tried to grab my blood. If you’ve never had anyone grab your blood, which I assume is most people, you might think that I couldn’t know that was what happened. But I did, because it’s pretty obvious. I felt like a bottle someone shook, sloshing forward. And I felt the effort of power trying to control me. My body wasn’t listening to me as I was drawn closer, but I didn’t technically need it to do anything.

It was a good thing I didn’t need any of those ‘somatic components’ Great Girl sometimes went on about. Or to speak. I might have been able to force my body to obey me to some extent, but my first reaction was to cast a spell.

They were lucky I didn’t have Meteor Swarm. I was probably lucky too, because I wasn’t really all that far away. I did have the next best thing, however, which was… light magic. Alright, so maybe that was about four hundred times worse, but it should be particularly appropriate. I wanted to cast a high level light spell but I’d never learned any and didn’t have a ton of spare mana, so I instinctively maxed out my Basic Light Magic with Multicasting.

There were seven vampires, five of which got a ball of light in the face or otherwise stuck to them. They shrieked and cursed and spewed obscenities which got half translated and confirmed to me that they were Rositsa-brand vampires but rude. Unsurprisingly, the one vampire stopped pulling on my blood as he wailed about accursed light. What a wimp, it wasn’t even sunlight. I probably needed to learn how to make that at some point.

Once my blood wasn’t being pulled against my body, I flew up and away. Then I spoke to the team to let them know that the vampires were not well behaved. “Vampires spotted. They’re aggressive. Unable to determine if truly hostile or simply panicked. Engage with caution.”

I didn’t think anyone was free to engage the vampires, but I still gave the warning. Upon determining they were Rositsa-brand vampires, however, I had further concerns about the angels. Because that meant these were at minimum overzealous enforcers.

Flying in front of the portal, I was relieved to see only a single angel hanging out on the other side in front of some sunlit clouds. Maybe it was just that it was night in New Bay, but it seemed way too bright on the other side. “Hey,” I said. I only knew one language from their world, so that was what they got. “You can’t just arbitrarily go sending people into other dimensions. We’ve got rules about that.”

I was supposed to follow up with asking them to state their intentions and the like. But I didn’t get to that point. “Foul demon speaking an accursed tongue!” He brandished a sword that shone with brilliant light, charging towards me.

My staff whipped forward, catching the blade on one end- I immediately used Dispel to suppress its magic- then using the added angular momentum to clock the angel in the face with the other end. He went reeling backwards.

“What a racist,” I commented. Was it the tusks? Didn’t Rositsa speak the same language as humans from her world?

I glanced over my shoulder to see how the sky battle was going. The big sky battle, since technically I was part of this local sky battle. It seemed while the angels were numerous they were individually weak, so even if Gloom had trouble fighting them Darkstargirl had been quite effective. There were several currently on fire, and I was pretty sure that more weren’t in the sky anymore. I would have felt bad for them if they weren’t jerks.

Great Girl wasn’t the best at aerial combat which was why those two hadn’t been smacked into a crater in the salt ponds. It also seemed difficult for her to coordinate with the angels, as they kept getting in her way. She had to be smaller so that she wouldn’t accidentally hit them with her moves. Mono was also having issues targeting the villains, though the more angels that dropped out the better.

“Command,” I commented. “Portal guardian was aggressive. It may be difficult to convince the remaining-”

I was going to say something about the angels going back through their portal and stuff, but I suddenly felt power on the other side. Power distributed through a number of individuals. Maybe a squad? Twenty or so tops, however they called that. They were flying towards the portal, and probably wouldn’t be super enthusiastic about the concussed angel in front of it.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

I made an executive decision to cut the portal. I could send the rest back home when we got around to it, but this was just an invasion now. It didn’t matter if they were vampires or angels.

Most of my remaining mana was put into my efforts to close the portal. I couldn’t afford to take too long, and it was somewhere around ten or fifteen feet wide. A whole squad could squeeze through fairly quickly, and considering my position… I wasn’t a fan of that idea.

The portal twisted into a figure eight and then folded over itself like one of those twisty sun guards people used in their car windows. I wasn’t sure if that was something I did or a consequence of the way they made their portal. Either way, when the two round parts of the figure eight met, the portal quite definitively shut. A burst of mana surged out. Well that was nice at least, I hadn’t been able to experience that in a while.

It would probably take them a bit to open the portal again, but I didn’t hang around to find out. I didn’t want to be there when they rushed through. I took stock of the angels- a good portion of which were now focused on me- and then the vampires- who were mostly still clawing at their faces but some of which were now giant bats. Did they not have any antimagic capabilities? Even normal people could probably rub a light spell onto a convenient surface. Probably. I wasn’t sure if I actually knew any of those.

“Update to command,” I said as pushed Fly as hard as I could. “Additional intrusion forces threatened to come through the portal. I’ve sealed it, and now the angels are mad at me.”

A voice appeared in my ear. “You know, I heard you were good at getting in trouble.” That was Mono. “I guess I never saw the full scope of your abilities before.”

I didn’t have to look over my shoulder to know a lot of angels were rushing at me. Should I have just left the portal alone? I tried to communicate. It wasn’t my fault. Given the choice between this, and the portal being open and being chased by another twenty angels, I had to choose this. Though maybe closing the portal was what made the rest so mad at me, since they probably didn’t notice I gave the portal guardian a little tap.

Portal surges were something I’d only experienced infrequently. The good news was that the mana came in far faster than ambient. The bad news was that it would still take me a minute to recover to a more functional quantity of mana, especially if I had to deal with… all of that.

Midnight had his standard level of worried acceptance. It was glad to know he believed in me. Now then, what was the best option here? I believed it was to rely on my allies.

Angels were pretty fast fliers. Or maybe Fly was just slow. Would more upgrades make it faster? Probably a bit late to think about that. Haste should work though. That was cheap enough that I didn’t have to wait for regen, and it should last just about long enough for me to absorb ambient mana.

The angels were clearly better at maneuvering than me, even though they had to use wings and I only used magic. But I was suddenly far faster than them as I circled around the area. I didn’t want to draw things too far from my allies, so I had to do that. I had to do a very wide arc.

“What language do you even speak?” I shouted towards the angels. I decided not to use the language they dubbed as evil. “Can’t you act like civilized people and resolve our differences in a series of one-on-one battles?”

One of them yelled something that partially translated. There were enough of them who understood the language for the first words to translate. Something about ‘usurper of light’ or ‘thief of righteousness’ or whatever.

“My friend is going to shoot you if you don’t stop!” I yelled to the one getting closest.

She didn’t listen. Then she fell out of the sky with a hole in her wing.

Normally, I would have heard a shot. But Mono’s power negated sound and generally allowed his bullets to fly quietly and swiftly towards his targets. “Thanks,” I said through the radio.

“No problem.”

I was only going to say it once. It would just get weird to say it every time, and there were dozens of these guys. “Shouldn’t you be attacking the villains?” I called back towards them. It was hard to speak slowly enough for people to understand with Haste going.

I’d gotten a good enough speed going to curve around towards the side of the fight where Great Girl was. She tried to come to my aid, but angels blocked her way. She was not happy about that. “Get out of my waaaaay!” The last words were a lupine howl.

Normally, Great Girl had excellent control of her shapeshifting abilities. That included her lycanthropy. Of course, normally, it also wasn’t Halloween. So when she got big to force her way through, she also grew teeth and claws and fur. One sweep of what was supposed to be an open palm swipe thankfully still mostly slapped the angels upside the head with only a few gashes. But the angel’s reaction was instant, turning their weapons on her.

Weren’t we forgetting something? Ah, right. I vaguely comprehended Gloom and Darkstargirl skittering off into the night as only a third or so of the angels was still focused on them- and such numbers were insufficient to hold them back. I’d apologize to Great Girl for not doing a better job of focusing on her nemeses later, but to be fair I still believed the portal was the biggest issue.

Then the question came into my head. Were these the sorts of angels that resisted cold? Coming from a land where they enforced perpetual sunlight… I was going to take a bet on no. I could have tried Chain Lightning, but there were too many of them for me to expect hitting them all. And with a whole flight of them bunched up behind me, wasn’t it only appropriate to use Blizzard?

Haste was about to fall off and I had the mana. So I went with that. I probably didn’t even need to turn around. I should be able to orient a spell backwards, and their magical signatures were clear enough. But just in case, I wanted to aim visually.

I gathered mana as I slowed down. They were getting closer. I waited until they were ten feet away- not so close such that one person would block for everyone else. They were coated in ice… and twenty or of thirty of them immediately began to fall.